About Nicole and Aha!

Nicole is passionate about building happy teams. She is the Director of People Success and Operations at Aha! - the world’s #1 product roadmap software. Previously, she led product and solutions at Perceptive Software, where she saw their enterprise content management platform through a successful $280 million acquisition by Lexmark.

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Remember the characters from Office Space? The movie is now almost 20 years old. Yet I still hear it quoted on a regular basis. One of my co-workers even dressed up as Bill Lumbergh for Halloween this year — complete with an Initech coffee mug. I think the movie clicked with people because it reflected some universal experiences. Read more…

I have a confession to make. I used to hate emojis. I would never use them. Why react to a message with a smiley face or a tiny gif of a party parrot when you could use actual words? But ever since joining our fully distributed team at Aha!, my anti-emoji stance has softened. Now I generously sprinkle thumbs-up and heart-eye cats into my messages.Read more…

I was getting a bit annoyed. I had sent an urgent task to a colleague and heard nothing back. It was funny since I had just seen this person in the hallway. So I sent an email and then a chat message. Nothing. I stopped by their desk, but it was empty. The next afternoon I found out the urgent task had been completed. It took a day and a half. But there was never an acknowledgment that my request was even received or that it was completed.

It was my first day. I had just joined the team at Aha! and was eager to get started. Exactly what “getting started” would look like was unclear to me. This was also my first time working with an entirely remote team. I knew I would open my laptop, log in… and then what?

I was wary at first. My previous company gathered everyone for an all-hands meeting. This was several years back when I was working at a fast-growing software company. About 150 people crammed into a room that was meant for maybe 25. People were practically on top of each other. Disaster ahead?

Do the words “offsite quarterly business review” or “annual sales kickoff” make you want to run far, far away? You are not the only one. Sitting through endless presentations in stale conference rooms — ugh. But these kinds of large group meetings are especially important for remote teams.

Have you seen the news? Some companies are calling their remote employees back to the office — a forced, cross-country trek to permanently “co-locate” at HQ. Reading the headlines, you may wonder if companies have fallen out of love with remote work.